


Turdly is _not_ a color

by Silex



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Humor, Slice of Life, Spaceships, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:02:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23497948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: On the off chance that it was some archaic term, or something that Sunlight had picked up from a language spoken by one of the passengers, Mirs referenced several dictionaries as well as net resources before informing Sunlight that turdly was not a color.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14
Collections: Robot Rainbow 2020





	Turdly is _not_ a color

**Author's Note:**

  * For [debirlfan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/debirlfan/gifts).



> Written for an exchange where fic titles had to be based off of AI generated color names. Between those and the prompts there was so much to draw inspiration from.

The _Valliant 304_ was a century ship, which meant that there was plenty of opportunity for Mirs to get bored as she piloted it across the vastness of space, most of which she managed to avoid. In fact, she considered herself lucky to be the pilot of such a ship, not that there had been many others interested in the job. It took a special kind of individual, one who’d reached the point where solving the mystery of all the repair tickets that had been submitted about unknown issues with the ship’s waste systems was a fun puzzle to work out. Mirs had reached that point and was looking over diagnostics for the section of the ship by the hydroponic park, because that was where the computer where most of the reports had been submitted from and therefore likely near the source of the problem.

What it came down to was that the human mind, even when uploaded onto a computer, was not equipped to deal with the consequences of immortality.

There was no transcendence, no moment of Zen, at least not for her. Maybe there were others out there who’d found enlightenment and peace, but for her it had resulted in the cultivation of a seemingly endless string of hobbies before settling on being a ship captain.

The problem was, she decided, after finding that long distance shipping proved a good fit, she’d agreed to the upload when she was in college, back when it was a fad that everyone was doing. ‘Create your own digital twin!’ was what it had been marketed as. She’d been young, impulsive and endlessly curious and, along with a bunch of friends, Mirs had gone through the process.

She and her physical version had finished school together, gone of a few wild adventures, but then something happened – the original, physical, her had grown up and matured, settled down and quite quickly they found that they had less and less in common with each other.

The digital Mirs continued to have adventures, free from the confines of a physical body, finding fun in countless different virtual worlds, joining and creating when she couldn’t find one that suited her, but always looking for something new and different.

And of course being digital didn’t mean that she didn’t have to work. Server space cost money and she still had to pay rent on her technicolor dream of a fantasy land. Coming home to a world where she had complete control over everything was fun, but there were times when it felt like the galaxy’s biggest, loudest and most distracting apartment. Or dorm room, because Zaxh had the most annoying tendency of stopping by uninvited and making himself at home. She’d had to clean whole virtual mountain ranges after he’d peppered them with casinos, amusement parks, and night clubs like the way a physical friend might leave pizza crusts and beer cans in your living room after a night together.

So she’d looked around for a job that might take her away from the usual crowd and into a space, virtual or otherwise, that actually felt like her own.

By that time several companies were looking to train uploaded individuals as ship pilots since, at the time, they proved easier to train for the job than AIs.

Her first ship was a ferry, taking workers to and from an orbital construction platform. The engineers and laborers were an interesting crowd, with plenty of ribald jokes that she would have given an arm to know back in college – telling the story about hydro-cutter and the maintenance tech certainly would have gotten some laughs with its punchline about pounds per inch versus _centimeter_.

They were good people and the job was interesting, even if the ship wasn’t hers and she traded it off at the end of each shift.

Eventually she started taking other jobs on her days off, building a résumé and working her way up to piloting ships for day cruises for wealthy clients.

Being put in a luxury liner was fun, way more fun than she’d expected. Charting the course to give clients what they wanted, controlling the systems of large, powerful and sometimes stupidly fast ships was an exciting challenge and gave her a chance to flex her capabilities in a way that she hadn’t been able to since uploading.

Slowly she worked her way up to bigger ships, longer journeys until she was doing half year star cruises.

Those were awesome because of the logistics elements that got added in, working with people to budget supplies, the best approaches to different spaceports, both dirtside and orbital, as well as trying to time things to give passengers the best view of any cosmic phenomena happening in the regions of space they were passing through. There was nothing like trimming the ship’s voltaic sails and activating redundancy shielding to pull in close to a solar storm.

When the rich and famous got to be too much and she couldn’t take any more clueless tourists she worked long haul shipping jobs, some of them taking years to complete.

Having her own digital space on the ship’s computer, the companionship of radio chatter that she could turn on and off as she pleased, was relaxing, giving her time to think.

Piloting a century ship, carrying colonists, all safely asleep in rotational stasis, ten years out, one month up, as they said in the business, felt like the best of both worlds. She talked to other uploaded people and the few AIs who did that kind of haul and was warned about Robinsons, the slang term for passengers who’d eventually refuse to go back to stasis, and Roosevelts, which were basically the same thing except more gregarious about it, feeling like talking to the pilot of the ship made them more important. She was reassured that if she called them captain and kept them out of harm’s way it wasn’t so bad.

The thing was, even the warnings made it sound fun and she signed up for it, seeing it as the adventure of a lifetime, the chance to leave her mark on the universe.

Knowing that there were several colony cities named after the pilots who’d carried the first colonists to the world didn’t hurt.

Mirstopia had a nice ring to it.

Or maybe Mirsburg. Now that was a really exotic sounding name, like some place out of a history book, with brooding castles and winding, asphalt highways where horses and skimmers passed each other on the way to enormous, open air strip malls.

What she wasn’t warned about was the AI crews that such ships always had.

It was like ferrying engineers who were also impossibly smart children.

Programed with an innate love of their assigned tasks, they were always looking for better, ‘smarter’ ways of doing their jobs.

Sometimes it meant pleasant surprises, sometimes not so pleasant.

Explaining to Sunlight 425 Through 450nm Plus 600 To 700nm, who had, of course, named itself, that while phytoplankton do produce a great deal of oxygen it shouldn’t focus exclusively on cultivating those plants in the oversized closet that was the ship’s hydroponic park was interesting. Never had she imagined or wanted to learn so much about legumes when Sunlight discovered its new favorite plants to grow for the park. At least it eventually developed an eye for aesthetics.

Maintenance Drone 2 had a sense of humor and a fondness for prime numbers that was something else entirely. Especially because the actual second maintenance drone was enough of a stickler for minutia that when Mirs called for Drone 2 to give a status report, it would as well. Even though it called itself TwoPrime, with no space, as though Mirs was writing its name anywhere. Drone 2 and TwoPrime were like a pair of sisters who fought over anything, expect they were in housed in lozenge shaped chaises that bristled with an assortment of limbs and were covered in hooks, hangers and holders for any tools they might need in their daily rounds. Breaking up a shoving match between the two of them as they each tried to clean a vent that both had decided was the most fun to clean was an ordeal when you didn’t have limbs of your own.

And then they’d give each other fawning apologies and buff out the scratches in each other’s chassis until they were polished to a mirror sheen.

They were very much a pair of quarter ton high school girls.

Astrolabe was the navigator, but also an amateur historian, who loved nothing more to talk to Mirs about the different ages of exploration. It also built model ships out of whatever it could find and had a whole fleet of perfect miniature ships that spanned a thousand plus years of history.

Of course the majority of the ships were of such a scale that Mirs had to turn her interior viewing cameras up to the maximum to see them and even then ask Astrolabe to hold them up closer, which always made her feel like an old lady.

Then it would leave the little ship on the manual input console in case she wanted to admire it further. As though she could properly admire something that sat comfortably on the enter key of the keyboard.

There were others of course, like the medical systems AI that was still trying to decide on a name for itself. The unnamed and strangely indecisive AI was one of the trio in charge of maintaining the human passengers while they were in stasis and determining which of them should be brought out of stasis in what order. In that it could make split second decisions for the good of its charges, knowing them all by name and biometric data and caring about their physical and mental health to the point where it had a list of topics to discuss with each passenger when they were up from stasis to, in its words, maximize their comfort and enjoyment of their motile time. Motile was its favorite word, which was why the other two AI called it Mo Motile, but it had yet to take that as a name, much to the amusement of Mr. Jive, who used feminine pronouns, and Soshu, who at least had the decency to choose a normal, human name.

Part of Mirs’ job wasn’t just supervising the AIs, but guiding their simulated neural development, which mean encouraging hobbies and talking to them. It was fun most of the time, especially when she was bored.

She’d taught them to play checkers and then chess and then watched as they invented their own game based on permutations of the two, staging competitions and championships that grew increasingly fierce and distracting for them until Mirs had to put a blanket ban on all games that took place on an eight by eight grid and any grids that were multiples thereof.

Teaching them to play cards was interesting because even if the AIs weren’t strict computers, they had an innate ability to count cards. She could never win against them in black jack and teaching them poker proved to be a mistake after Mr. Jive did some research of her own and learned of the concept of strip poker.

You hadn’t seen crazy until you saw a group of AIs whose mechanical bodies had interchangeable parts removing those parts after a bad hand in cards.

The Drone sisters and the others of their model type were quickly banned from most games, needing to play amongst themselves because of the unfair advantage given by the number of limbs they possessed, as well as all the tools they carried. It was probably for the better because Sunlight wore the wrenches it had won from them after an impossibly good hand, like trophies, using them in its own maintenance routines in the hydroponics park.

It wasn’t just her teaching the AIs though, they researched and came up with games of their own. Some, but thankfully not all of them, were endlessly curious and came up with methods to engage Mirs in new and interesting ways.

Like Sunlight who paged her with the most hilarious announcement of, ‘I spy with my secondary optic sensors something orange’.

After several guesses it turned out to be the caution sign on the connectors for the nutrient tubing.

Mirs had responded by informing Sunlight that she spied something pink, which had taken it several tries, until it considered that she was not in the same room as it, and it pulled up the data logs from the ship and determined that Mirs meant the aurora of the planet they were approaching to use its gravitational pull for a course correction.

Sunlight next spied something blue, which was, of course, a vat of its favorite algae and correctly guessed on the first try that the red Mirs saw was on the flag of the model of an ancient sailing ship that Astrolabe had left on the console in the main control room, which was where Mir thought of herself as being.

“I spy…” Sunlight responded slowly, with great relish, “With my secondary optic sensors…something…turdly.”

On the off chance that it was some archaic term, or something that Sunlight had picked up from a language spoken by one of the passengers, Mirs referenced several dictionaries as well as net resources before informing Sunlight that turdly was not a color.

“It is too,” Sunlight responded with a great deal of pride, “One that I made up myself to describe something based on the visible as well as infrared spectrum given off by…something. Something that is turdly.”

The nutrient tubing wasn’t turdly, nor were the filtration systems for the tanks. The composting unit had been an obvious, but wrong guess, which was concerning.

“Should it be that color?” Mirs asked nervously, wondering if she should send a maintenance drone down to check things.

“Yes!” Sunlight beamed, “It means that they’re growing very well.”

That was a hint at least, letting Mirs that she needed to look for plants. Was it the mushrooms that Iron Wolf, the AI charged with cooking for the passengers who weren’t in stasis, had asked be grown?

It turned out to be no, which was kind of a disappointment because it was really the perfect color for a mushroom. Mirs had never liked the slimy little fungi when she had a physical body and all the years of distance from that hadn’t improved her opinion of them.

Maybe she was looking at things the wrong way, literally with the sensor system she was using to view things not correctly tuned. Sunlight had mentioned infrared emissions as well, so she switched to a camera setting that would give her more thermal information.

Several enormous flowers were glowing like beacons.

Those flowers turned out to be the answer, which prompted a new question, “What are you growing down there?”

“Titan aurums!” Sunlight replied proudly, “The genetic library carries the information on so many fun plants and I figured why not clone some? Their thermal signature is so pretty!”

Mirs was willing to agree with Sunlight there, it was fascinating to see a plant that heated up like that and, after a quick bit of research on those flowers Mirs discovered that they had quite the reputation for their unique, potent and absolutely terrible stink, which wouldn’t matter at all to an AI.

Which solved the mystery of why the passengers who were out of stasis were avoiding the hydroponic park and complaining that it smelled like the waste management systems were on the fritz.


End file.
